Book Review: Stand Firm

[osprey_archer]

One thing about Netgalley is that it really highlights trends in my reading - in particular, the fact that I read a lot of self-help books. Even more particularly, I like self-help books about how self-help books and positive psychology are the worst. Someday I will find one that asserts that self-help books are the worst because they rarely plumb the depths of how very bad we really are, and how can anyone possibly improve when they don’t even have a clear sense of what they’re doing wrong in the first place, and then I will have reached anti-self-help nirvana and… well, let’s be real, I’ll probably continue reading anti-self-help books. (Another thing that anti-self-help books don’t say often enough is that most people don’t actually change that much once they’re adults, and when they do it’s not always an improvement.)

Anyway. My newest anti-self-help fling is Svend Brinkmann’s Stand Firm: Resisting the Self-Improvement Craze, which is refreshing in the breathtaking directness with which it dismisses, well, everything really. The culture of constant development! The idea of self-improvement! The entire idea of the self!

No, seriously: “under the surface, inside, there is nothing, no authenticity,” Brinkmann says. He also quotes a psychologist who suggested that “the depression epidemic in the West is explained by the fact that if you look inwards long enough - if you dwell on how you feel, and use therapy to find yourself - then depression will descend the moment you realise that there is, in fact, nothing there.”

I think saying that there is nothing is an overstatement - people do seem to have stable basic personalities, for instance, and I think it’s valuable to know that sort of thing about yourself. But if you’re perusing your deepest soul for the meaning of life and find nothing but a tendency toward introversion and a middling score for neuroticism, then of course that’s going to be a disappointment, not because introversion or neuroticism are bad but because they’re not a Meaning of Life (™).

Brinkmann’s rejection of the idea of an authentic inner self leads to another point that I found interesting, the idea that we are the masks we wear. “You might also ask why it is assumed that it is inside ourselves that we are most truly ‘ourselves.’ Why is the self not reflected in our actions, our lives and our relationships with others…?”

So there is no such thing as inner kindness, for instance, because kindness is entirely about how we treat others. If we feel that we’re being kind but other people don’t experience it that way, then we’re not. Or truthful, reliable, humorous, punctual, responsible, or any number of other traits that are based on how other people experience us.

(My cynical answer to Brinkmann’s probably rhetorical question is that believing in an inner self that is more real than the outer self allows us more space to rationalize away our own flaws, and that’s why we cling to the idea so fiercely. If we believe in our own inner goodness, we can do away with the necessity to actually do good things in order to feel good about ourselves.)

And one last quote, because it made me wince in recognition: “Many people, unfortunately, buy into the idea that they can ‘do anything’... so self-flagellation is a perfectly understandable reaction when their efforts prove inadequate. If you can do anything, then it must be your fault if success proves elusive in work or love (for Freud, ‘lieben und arbeiten’ were the two most significant existential arenas). Little wonder, then, that nowadays so many hanker after a psychiatric diagnosis to explain away perceived personal inadequacies.”

No one’s going to forgive you for suffering from the universal frailties of humanity. If you want forgiveness for your flaws, you’d damn well better be able to pony up with proof that those so-called flaws are actually a disease.

Comments

[bunn.livejournal.com]

This is a fascinating review, and I do like your last para. I guess the thing that follows from it is that perhaps forgiving other people for their universal frailties is a sensible move?

Do you really think people don't change a lot? The people I know seem to have changed a great deal over time so far, but perhaps that is more a matter of getting to know them better by observation over a longer period...

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

Yeah. I think forgiving people for their frailties, regardless of whether that frailty is intense enough to warrant a diagnosis, is usually a sound move. After all, we never know what people are politely putting up with from us, so we might as well politely put up with their flaws too.

I think that insofar as people do change, it's often not as a result of conscious self-help-book-inspired effort; people are changed by time and circumstance. And someone who is, say, habitually late to everything when they're 25 is probably going to keep that up for the rest of their life.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Wow, I love this guy, at least as presented by you, because I agree with him entirely! (Well, okay--like you, I think nothing inside is an overstatement; like you, I think people do have personalities and natures--but otherwise)

This is a variation of what he said, but: I also think introspection can feed a depression because when you turn inward, you're not giving yourself any new grist, input, materials--whatever you want to call it--to work with. For introspection to be worthwhile, you have to get out there and give yourself stuff to introspect about, by which I don't mean that everyone needs to explore the Amazon or travel to Berlin, or even that we have to accost strangers to hear their life stories, but we do need to pay attention to people and think about their stories--as part of friendly goodwill and because people deserve our time and attention, but also because we ourselves benefit from doing that--and we need to be reading books (or other stuff) and noticing the sparrows in the park and listening to music--anything! But we need to pay attention to the world outside the walls of our own mind.

I loved your first paragraph, too. I'll gladly keep reading your reviews of anti-self-help books.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

He also recommends reading novels instead of self-help books because they give you a wider and more varied view of human nature. I am hard-pressed to disagree with any advice that includes the words "read more novels."

And yes, absolutely to your second paragraph! I think there is (at least often) a sort of snake-eating-its-own-tail feeling to depression: the mind goes around and around the same things, because nothing new from the outside is getting in.

Which is perhaps why the geographical cure was so popular for nervous problems in the nineteenth century? A change of place is a shock to the system and at least makes it a little more likely that one can at least crack open a window in the walls of the mind. As it were.

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

This sounds really interesting! I like the idea of there being not as much of a distinction between the inside self and the outside self as we like to think. It matches some studies I've seen recently: that faking a smile can actually improve your mood, and that doing things like punching a pillow or yelling in private (which many people advocate as a way of letting off steam) actually makes it easier for you to lose your temper.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

But what are we supposed to do with our anger if not release it by impotently punching pillows?

...Honestly, I think that "impotently" probably explains why pillow-punching and solitary screaming don't actually release any anger. Neither of them do anything to solve the problem; they just reinforce the idea that you aren't allowed to express any anger in public ever.

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

It's been ages since I read the article, but if I remember correctly, the idea is that emotions are much more like habits than we tend to think. So every time you punch a pillow, it trains a path in your brain that anger = punching, and makes it easier and easier to make that leap the next time. Whereas if each time you do... I dunno, some sort of productive anger expressing thing, you'd be building up those "brain muscles" instead.

It does seem logical, but I still wonder if there isn't value to the "blowing off steam" approach as well. We can't all be perfect emotion-expressers 100% of the time.

[evelyn-b.livejournal.com]

I think I like this guy! I don't even know if I'm ready to agree with you that "nothing" is an overstatement, though I wouldn't rush to adapt it as an explanation for depression, either.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

I certainly wouldn't consider "discovery of the ultimate nothingness of the self" to be an explanation for all depression, although it wouldn't surprise me at all if there are some people for whom that description really resonates. It's like a loss of faith, only in the self rather than God.

Actually, this book clarified something for me, which is that when people blather on about the invention of the self they don't actually mean that they think premodern people were wandering around vaguely unaware of themselves as distinct beings rather than part of a hive mind. They did see themselves as individuals; they just didn't have the same conception of a quasi-mystical inner self as a guide for how you should live your life that we do.

...Actually, I bet there are some people who really do mean option #1, because people are just like that.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

“the depression epidemic in the West is explained by the fact that if you look inwards long enough - if you dwell on how you feel, and use therapy to find yourself - then depression will descend the moment you realise that there is, in fact, nothing there.”

Fun fact: the opposite can also cause a depression epidemic! Some countries where people don't do much therapy and society encourages more of an outward view also have high suicide/depression rates. There is no escape. (I want to close on a emoticon of wry despair but I'm not sure what it would be.)

I like self-help books about how self-help books and positive psychology are the worst.

Ha ha. Do you have other recs for those?

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

Well, damn. Damned if you do and damned if you don't, I suppose. Is there a middle ground that a society can tread, or do we just inevitably slide into one extreme or another?

I'm sure I've read more books about Positive Psychology, Scourge of Creation, but the only one that is coming to mind right now is Ruth Whippman's America the Anxious.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Ironically the countries with the lowest suicide rates are the most messed-up overall: war-torn, no social services, corrupt government, etc.

It's mostly a trick of statistics: if people are dying like flies, then other causes of death outstrip suicide. The more functional a society is, the longer people live, so people die of cancer, heart disease, and (trailing but still # 3) suicide. But if people are starving to death and being shot in the streets, suicide rates seem low because other stuff is getting people first.

That aside, there doesn't seem to be a clear social answer for suicide. Happier societies still have it for sort of related reasons to the purely statistical ones - if you eliminate other reasons for people to be miserable (like being persecuted), you still have stuff like depression, personal angst, etc. (And possibly personal problems seem even worse if there's no overwhelming social explanation for them, everyone else seems happy, etc.) Altering the environment and social context gives you different reasons for suicide and depression, but they don't make either disappear entirely.